Chilton was invited to join the CBC reality show about a year ago for its seventh season.

On the show, the five Dragons hear pitches from would-be entrepreneurs and invest their own money if they think the company will be successful.

For the first six seasons, many of the pitches on the show were weak, but the quality picked up in the seventh season, Chilton told the audience of about 750 at Bingemans.

“I’ve been lucky,” he says.

He described one deal in which he invested in a steeped tea enterprise launched by a husband and wife team.

He knew a lot about the food business after backing the hugely successful Looneyspoonscookbooks by Greta and Janet Podleski. Based on that knowledge, he thought the company would be a winner and he was right.

The firm has been so successful, it has even expanded into the U.S., he said. “The growth has been hard to keep up with.”

But his best deal came from investing in an unusual greeting card company started by Mary McQueen of Victoria, B.C., called Hand and Beak.

Normally, greeting cards and board games are guaranteed losers on the show because the market is dominated by several large players, Chilton said.

But McQueen had a quirky sales pitch that included a yellow lovebird called Luigi, he said.

It turns out Luigi was more than just a decorative touch. The bird shredded paper that the company used to create collage-like greeting cards, Chilton said.

He thought the cards were “uniquely good” so he decided to invest $10,000 and take a 25 per cent ownership stake in the company.

After contacting Hallmark Canada, Chilton was able to persuade the company to offer the cards in stores right after the Dragons’ Den episode aired. The items sold out in two to three days, Chilton said.

The show has played a huge part in stimulating entrepreneurship in the country, he said.

He’s talked to young people who’ve been moved to start their own companies after watching Dragons’ Den.

Chilton said he likes the show’s mix of “crazy” and conventional entrepreneurs because it mirrors what is happening in the real world.

Moving on to the world economy, Chilton said he’s not optimistic based on the huge amount of debt run up by governments and individuals.

“At some point, there is going to be another (financial) crisis,” he predicted.

Fuelled by low-interest rates that “incentivize” borrowing, consumers have fallen in love with acquiring too much “stuff,” he said.

He calls it the “granite countertop phenomenon.” If you don’t have a granite countertop, you haven’t made it, he noted.